Moral Adaptation: Sustaining Climate Activism When Futures Fail

• In Event: Culture and the Construction of Expectations & Outcomes

Abstract

How does collective action persist when the futures that once justified it become implausible? Social movement scholarship highlights the importance of moral commitments and temporal strategies in sustaining engagement, yet it typically treats these dimensions in parallel. This paper argues instead that moral grammars and temporal horizons are structurally linked and subject to transformation.
Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative analysis of sixty-seven weekly national community calls of a German climate resistance group between 2023 and 2024, supplemented by interviews and field observations, the paper traces how the group affirmed moral obligation amid increasing doubts about the preventability of climate catastrophe. The analysis identifies a process of moral adaptation, in which activists respond to changing temporal horizons by reweighing existing commitments and relocating their temporal arc: from a consequentialist focus on catastrophe prevention toward a virtue-ethical orientation centered on responsible conduct under conditions of crisis.
More broadly, the paper argues that morality should be analyzed not only as a motivational resource but also as a dynamic evaluative structure whose temporal orientation can adapt to adverse conditions.

Author

• Daphne Katharina Fietz, Yale University